Book 1:The Alchemyst - Book 2: The Magician - Book 3: The Sorceress
Are 15 year-old Sophie and Josh Newman the legendary twins who will save the world for humans or are they just pawns in a mythical battle between the alchemist Nicholas Flamel and the magician John Dee? Sophie and Josh are working at boring summer jobs in a coffee shop and a book store when their lives are changed forever. The books feature characters from legend such as Machiavelli, Joan of Arc and William Shakespeare as well as gods such as Hekate, the Witch of Endor and the stag-headed god Curnunnos. Michael Scott is adept at introducing modern magical technology such as cell phones and GPS tracking into the ancient world that includes auras and ley lines. This is a classic quest story deftly handled with exciting battles and clever escapes - it seems that magic has its weak points. This is a fun entry into the young adult world of Harry Potter and the Golden Compass suitable for the fantasy lover of any age. ~Gretchen Echols
Lucie de la Tour du Pin was a survivor and witness to an era of terrifying and dangerous political mood swings – the French Revolution. As a member of the minor nobility, she witnessed major intellectual debates in the salon of her stern and domineering grandmother. Her mother, who died young, was a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. Her stepmother was a first cousin to the Empress Josephine. Her husband fought alongside Lafayette in the American Revolution. Her half-sister Fanny married a faithful follower of Napoleon and followed him into exile. She was a refugee émigré in Regency England and upstate New York and lost and regained a fortune.
Based on Lucie’s memoirs and numerous letters to her goddaughter, this lucid biography is a fascinating page-turner. It clearly recounts the various political factions and fast paced power changes during and as a result of the Revolution. This is a woman born in privilege but at the mercy of a cruel grandmother and treacherous political change. Throughout she kept her spirits up and valiantly made the best of circumstances presented to her.
~Gretchen Echols
T.R. Reid begins The Healing of America with the premise that a nation’s health care system is a reflection of it’s basic moral values. Instead of dry lists of statistics or muddled ranting he offers an insightful journey through the four basic models of health care delivery and how they are practiced around the world. He uses an old shoulder injury causing pain and limited range of motion as the vehicle to compare how health care is provided in Europe, Asia and the United States. He not only talks with the doctors he sees, but other patients, people in government and related health care fields. He suggests possible alternatives to the current state of American health care in a well reasoned, organized manner. By offering examples that include the things that are satisfactory as well as those that are not, he shows how other systems change and adjust over time. No system is perfect, but other systems deliver more and better care for less money than the American system, and leave no one at risk of death or financial ruin due to lack of insurance. It is a pleasure to read this book, both for style and content. ~Marla Vandewater
Beginning in the waning years of Victorian England, following the lives and intermingling of five families and many acquaintances through the end of the first World War, The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt is a sprawling novel of people in a world of art and social upheaval. Olive Wellwood is a very successful writer of children’s literature. In addition to her published works, she keeps an ongoing fairy tale, the center of their relationship, for each of her seven children. She and her husband Humphrey consider themselves freethinkers. They associate with artists, writers and intellectuals. While Olive’s sister Violet lives with them and manages the household, the children are mostly left to raise themselves. Through the lives of her characters, Byatt paints a picture of a society in a swirl of creative and intellectual ferment, of stories and beautiful objects and cafes full of intellectual exchange. Below this surface of energy and creativity are many uncomfortable and ugly secrets and nothing is left out as the world of the parents overlaps the world of the children with complex and sometimes devastating consequences. As always with A.S Byatt, the writing is superb, the scope impressive. I loved this novel. ~Marla Vandewater
One French critic called it “an inartistic … scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron” with a “hideously unfinished” appearance. Another denounced it as an “odious column of bolted metal.” Hard as it is to believe, the 1,000-foot Eiffel Tower–built as the centerpiece of Paris’ 1889 Exposition Universelle–was considerably less appreciated at the time of its raising than it is nowadays.
In her entertaining new history, Eiffel’s Tower (Viking, $27.95), Jill Jonnes recounts the myriad difficulties that engineer Gustave Eiffel faced in finishing his monumental erection. But she also offers a three-ring circus of contemporaneous characters. Prominent among those is Buffalo Bill Cody, who brought his Wild West Show–complete with stampeding Indians and sharpshooter Annie Oakley–to the Paris world’s fair at the start of what would be a highly profitable European tour. Appearing here, too, is bad-boy newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., who lorded over what had been his father’s New York Herald, while also establishing a Paris edition of that broadsheet, which promoted the ’89 expo–and eventually became part of today’s International Herald Tribune. Further animating this volume’s narrative are artists (including the tortured Vincent van Gogh and the mercurial James McNeill Whistler), and inventor extraordinaire Thomas Edison, who delighted Parisian dignitaries with his new talking phonographs.
Jonnes notes here, as well, that the Paris fair was important in educating the French about their colonial empire’s foreign acquisitions. Quoting from one newspaper account, she writes that “Fairgoers were lured by the ‘smell of Oriental spices and north African couscous, the sound of Senegalese tom-toms, Polynesian flutes and Annamite [Vietnamese] gongs, the sight of Moslem minarets and Cambodian temples. In the bazaars of the large Algerian and Tunisian pavilions craftsmen fashioned jewelry, finely tooled leather and brightly colored tapestries.’” Amid such exotic enticements, it’s a wonder that anyone found time to scale Eiffel’s tower–then the tallest manmade structure in the world. ~ Jeff Pierce
How does one go about daily life in a city under constant missile and sniper barrage? This gem of a novel follows the arc of four lives during 22 days in May and June 1992: the cellist, the sniper, the water carrier and the baker. Through their eyes we come to understand the cost of modern war in a city that seems familiar. Sarajevo is an hour’s plane ride from Italy – closer by plane than Seattle is to Spokane.
The cellist uses music to mourn the random, senseless loss of 22 people, killed by shells while waiting to buy bread. The sniper, faced with the dilemma of killing for peace, must in the end face the implications of those killings. The water carrier and baker confront death in the simple acts of crossing streets and choosing to help neighbors and acquaintances.
Contained in this short work is a world committed to life. The heroics appear small insignificant choices but they mean the difference between dull acquiescence to circumstance or active living in an impossible situation. Here are some clues for living for all of us in an increasingly difficult world. ~Gretchen Echols
Cressida, born after World War II, is haunted by the horrors of the holocaust. Her comatose father lies in an upstairs room in the servants’ quarters tended by a faithful black retainer on an estate in South Africa. She spars with her mother who is addicted to romantic notions of love. Her conventional older sister wakes the household often with her nightmares of being attacked by Germans.
They have been given the use of the servants’ quarters by the owner of the estate, George Harding, disfigured by his own war injury. He goes about in a hat with a veil to hide the hideous burns sustained when he was shot down in a raid. George conscripts the reluctant Cressida to entertain his hapless nephew Edgar who has come to live with him.
As Lynn Freed recounts Cressida’s coming of age over a span of about eight years, characters are revealed to be classic fairytale types: a fairy godmother, a prince under the influence of a spell, a queen grasping at the remnants of her beauty. Hidden secrets are brought to light. As the years from sassy, recalcitrant pre-teen to lovely young woman are recounted, Lynn Freed, in spare concise prose, weaves a spell as magical as any fairytale. ~ Gretchen Echols.
After 13 years as a pastry chef at the legendary Chez Panisse and several more years as a cook book author specializing in the sweet endings of a meal, David Lebovitz needed a radical change. He “shook the etch-a-sketch” of his life and moved to Paris.The Sweet Life in Paris is an account of his experiences as a resident, not a tourist, as he makes his way through the fish markets, chocolate shops and department stores of this legendary city. His humorous, mini-essays about the challenges of living in a foreign culture are full of love and goodwill even when complaining how Parisians are aggressive about cutting in line. He attempts to be understanding when faced with the daunting challenge of finding shoelaces, with a myriad of sizes on display except the necessary 110 centimeter laces. And he is baffled when clerks demand exact change, feigning an absence of the crucial centimes to return. At the end of each essay he includes a recipe for something delicious – sweet or savory. Each recipe sounded more scrumptious than the last. I kept thinking, “That’s not so hard, even I could make that” as I flagged recipes that seemed especially mouthwatering like “Carnitas” – caramelized pork, or Chocolate Macaroons. My friends, true chocoholics, loved the Chocolate Macaroons, small morsels of almond chocolate meringue filled with an intense chocolate filling. Each recipe has a short intro that gives some insight into why David includes it in his book. He provides cooking tips developed through testing the recipes in his miniscule apartment kitchen with counter-tops that are too high and storage space that is practically non-existent. So, if you can’t make it to Paris soon, immerse yourself in this book. Whip up one of his savory or sweet recipes, have some friends over (or not), close your eyes and imagine you are part of the sweet life of Paris. ~Gretchen Echols
Philip Kerr set out to pen a trilogy about World War II-era Berlin cop turned private eye Bernie Gunther, beginning with March Violets (1989). But he’s now up to five volumes. In the newest, A Quiet Flame (Putnam, $26.95), Gunther poses as a Nazi war criminal and escapes to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1950. Everywhere he goes in South America’s most European city, he seems to come across some former Hitler henchman, now living behind an assumed name and innocent occupation, benefiting from President Juan Perón’s interest in permanently retired Nazis — and their ill-gotten gains. Gunther might have liked to disappear, too. But instead he’s called on by the local chief of police, who knows something of his sordid background, to help investigate the gruesome slaying of a young girl — a case that bears similarities to another, unsolved homicide that Gunther worked on during his police days. The story offers lots of flashbacks, placing a more hopeful Gunther in the wild Berlin of 1932, where he delves into the “lust murder” of Anita Schwarz, a disabled part-time prostitute. Kerr does an excellent job of bringing to life such characters as Perón and his wife, Eva, as well as Adolf Eichmann and Otto Skorzeny. And he mixes them with winning fictional figures, notably Anna Yagubsky, a fetching young Jewish woman who wants the older Gunther’s help in finding her lost relatives, and in return assists him in the Schwarz probe, no matter the dangers involved — or the bed sheets they must tangle along the way. Questions about Argentina’s collaboration with the Nazis and its anti-Semitism only add further spice to A Quiet Flame. There are just enough loose ends in the last chapter to suggest that Kerr has a sixth Bernie Gunther book in the works. Thank goodness. ~ Jeff Pierce
Wartime Berlin, a city where the police answer to the Gestapo, tension is everywhere, and ordinary people struggle to survive is the setting for Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone. Written in 1947 and based on real events, this novel is translated into English for the first time. It opens with the delivery to Anna and Otto Quangel notification of the death of their son in the invasion of France. A quiet working class couple who keep to themselves, they share a building with a retired judge, a Nazi party family, an opportunistic petty criminal and an elderly Jewish woman. Grief over their son’s death, inspires them to begin a campaign of writing anti-Hitler postcards, dropping them in buildings around the city. They envision the rising of the common people against Nazi control of their lives as the cards are passed from hand to hand, inspiring discussion and dissent. In reality the cards are immediately turned in to the police, inspiring only terror in the hapless individuals who pick them up. In the dance of cruelty, manipulation, conspiracy and betrayal surrounding them, they doggedly continue to drop their postcards. United and fearless, convinced the war will be over soon and life will be better, they grow closer as the months go by. The police inspector in charge of their case is initially amused. As time passes Gestapo pressure increases, amusement turns to frustration and fear. Well written, following multiple intersecting storylines giving a taste of life in wartime Berlin, this is a can’t put down novel. ~Marla Vandewater
